Alice Paul

Alice Stokes Paul was born on January 11, 1885, at Paulsdale, her family's farm in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Her parents, William Mickle Paul and Tacie Parry Paul, were Hicksite Quakers, and the household followed the Quaker principle of equality between men and women. Tacie Paul was a suffragist herself and sometimes brought her daughter along to women's suffrage meetings, an early education that Alice later credited with shaping her convictions ^[1].

The family was comfortable. William Paul was a banker and businessman, and the farm gave the children a rural upbringing grounded in plain living and community service. Alice attended Moorestown Friends School, where she graduated at the top of her class, then entered Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution her grandfather had helped found. She earned a degree in biology there in 1905 ^[2].

Academic work came easily to her, and she kept accumulating credentials for the rest of her life. After Swarthmore she studied at the New York School of Philanthropy, worked in settlement houses on the Lower East Side, and completed a master's degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1907. She would eventually add a Ph.D. from Penn in 1912, and much later three law degrees, including a doctorate in civil law from American University in 1928 ^[3].

A fellowship took Paul to England in 1907 to study social work at a Quaker training center in Birmingham, and the trip changed the direction of her life. There she encountered the militant wing of the British suffrage movement led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. Paul joined the Women's Social and Political Union, sold suffrage newspapers on street corners, and took part in demonstrations. British authorities arrested her repeatedly. During imprisonments in 1909 she joined hunger strikes and endured forcible feeding, a brutal procedure that left her health permanently weakened but her resolve intact ^[1].

In England she also met Lucy Burns, an American from Brooklyn who had likewise been drawn into the Pankhurst campaigns. The two became close allies. When Paul returned to the United States in 1910, she brought both a doctoral project on the legal status of women in Pennsylvania and a conviction that the American movement, then focused on slow state-by-state campaigns, needed a national constitutional amendment and far more aggressive tactics ^[4].

In 1912 Paul and Burns persuaded the National American Woman Suffrage Association to let them take over its nearly dormant Congressional Committee in Washington. Their first act announced a new era. On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Paul staged a suffrage procession of several thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue, led by the lawyer Inez Milholland on a white horse. Hostile crowds mobbed the marchers while police largely stood by, and the resulting scandal put the federal suffrage amendment back on the front pages ^[2].

Paul's methods soon split her from the cautious leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She and Burns formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913, and in 1916 it became the National Woman's Party. Borrowing a strategy from British politics, Paul held the party in power responsible for inaction: her organization campaigned against Democratic candidates, including Wilson, so long as the administration blocked the amendment ^[4].

In January 1917 the National Woman's Party began picketing the White House, the first organized group ever to do so. The women, who called themselves Silent Sentinels, stood at the gates six days a week holding banners that asked, in Wilson's own wartime language of democracy, why American women remained voteless. After the United States entered the First World War, the pickets were increasingly attacked by crowds and arrested on charges of obstructing traffic. More than 200 women were arrested during the campaign, and many were sent to the District jail or the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ^[5].

Paul herself was sentenced to seven months in October 1917. In prison she began a hunger strike, was moved to a psychiatric ward in an attempt to discredit her, and was force-fed. Reports of the treatment of the suffrage prisoners, including the beatings of November 14, 1917, remembered as the Night of Terror at Occoquan, generated public sympathy and political pressure. Wilson announced his support for the federal amendment in January 1918. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919, and Tennessee's ratification on August 18, 1920, made it law, enfranchising roughly 26 million American women ^[1].

Any account of Alice Paul achievements has to reckon with the movement's failures as well. Like other white suffrage leaders of her era, Paul made compromises that marginalized Black suffragists, most visibly in the arrangements for the 1913 parade, and the Nineteenth Amendment in practice left many Black women in the South still barred from voting by discriminatory state laws. Historians continue to debate her record on race alongside her organizational brilliance ^[6].

Paul regarded the vote as a beginning rather than an end. In 1923, at a National Woman's Party gathering in Seneca Falls marking the 75th anniversary of the 1848 women's rights convention, she introduced the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional guarantee that legal rights could not be denied on account of sex. She initially called it the Lucretia Mott Amendment after the Quaker abolitionist ^[3].

The proposal divided the women's movement for decades. Many reformers and labor advocates opposed it, fearing it would strike down protective legislation that limited working hours and conditions for women. Paul held her position, arguing that laws treating women differently ultimately confined them. She earned law degrees in the 1920s in part to argue the case more effectively ^[5].

Her work also reached beyond the United States. In the 1930s she founded the World Woman's Party, based in Geneva, and pressed for equality provisions in international agreements. She campaigned successfully for a reference to the equal rights of men and women in the preamble of the United Nations Charter in 1945, and she was among those who lobbied to have "sex" included as a protected category in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ^[4].

Paul never married and had no children. She lived frugally, devoted nearly all of her time to organizing, and was known among colleagues for a quiet, relentless intensity rather than platform oratory. Contemporaries described a small, slight woman who spoke softly, slept little, and expected the same total commitment from others that she demanded of herself ^[2].

Her Quaker faith remained the steady frame of her life. She traced her activism directly to the Quaker teaching of equality and often said that working for women's rights was simply part of that inheritance. For years the National Woman's Party operated from houses near the Capitol, and Paul lived much of her adult life at or near the party's headquarters, the Sewall-Belmont House on Constitution Avenue, now preserved as the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument ^[5].

Paul stayed in the fight far longer than most of her generation. She led the National Woman's Party's lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment through the 1940s and 1950s, when major party platforms endorsed it but Congress did not act. She lived to see a new feminist movement take up her cause: Congress finally passed the ERA in 1972 and sent it to the states ^[3].

Even then she was wary. Paul reportedly worried that the seven-year ratification deadline attached to the amendment would doom it, a concern that proved well founded when the amendment fell short of the required 38 states before the extended deadline expired in 1982. By that time she was no longer alive to argue the point ^[6].

A stroke in 1974 left her incapacitated, and she spent her final years in care facilities near her childhood home. Alice Paul died on July 9, 1977, in Moorestown, New Jersey, at the age of 92, and was buried at the Quaker cemetery at Westfield Friends in Cinnaminson ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Alice Paul finds a figure who reshaped American protest itself. The White House picket line, the hunger strike as political theater, the single-issue pressure party: these tactics passed from her campaigns into the standard repertoire of American civil disobedience. The Nineteenth Amendment remains the largest single expansion of the American electorate accomplished by constitutional change, and Paul's organization forced it onto the national agenda when established groups thought it decades away ^[5].

Her memory is kept in concrete places. Paulsdale, her birthplace in Mount Laurel, is a National Historic Landmark and home of the Alice Paul Institute, which runs leadership programs for girls. The Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument in Washington preserves the National Woman's Party headquarters and its archives. In 2016 the United States Treasury announced that Paul would appear among the suffragists on a redesigned ten dollar bill ^[2].

The Equal Rights Amendment she drafted has never entered the Constitution, and the century-long argument over it means Alice Paul facts still surface in current politics whenever ratification debates revive. That unfinished business is part of her legacy too: a reminder, visible in any Alice Paul biography, that she measured victory not by the vote alone but by full legal equality, a standard the country has yet to meet ^[6].